BY HILL AND SHORE
Angus Martin
In October of last year I delivered a letter to INNEAN MOR, which must make me the first postman - albeit an off-duty postman - to have delivered there since the early nineteenth century. How did this remarkable event arise? Read on........
On the 4th of that month, I had a walk to the Inans with George McSporran, Jimmy MacDonald and Ewan White, the husband of a niece. We took the route through Gleneadardacrock, Ewan having left his car at Glenahanty, and returned by climbing Cnoc Moy, skirting the cliffs of Aignish, and walking the road from Largybaan back down to Glenahanty.
There we met Mrs Helen Togneri, awaiting the return of her husband, Mr Ronnie Togneri - Principal Teacher of Art at Campbeltown Grammar School - who was helping their son, Johnny, carry provisions, camping gear, and art materials to the Inans for a week’s stay there.
I was at the start of a week’s holiday, and was intending returning to the Inans later that week, so, thinking I might perform a useful service, I contacted the Togneris and offered to carry out any supplementary provisions. The offer was accepted, and arrangements made.
On Wednesday, Mrs Togneri met me at the bus stance on Kinloch Road at 10 a.m. and gave me a carrier bag containing food, a copy of The Guardian of that day, and a letter for Johnny. The Togneris intended returning to Glenahanty that afternoon to rendezvous with Johnny near Largybaan, but, no matter, here was a ploy!
I halted at Craigaig sheep-fank and ate my lunch and smoked, then headed inland on to the moors and down the southern flank of the Inans Glen. When the bay came into view, Johnny’s camp was visible, but no Johnny. I scanned the hillside, and soon spotted him - disconcertingly distant - as a silhouette on a crag above Innean Mor township. So intent was he on trying to boil tea on a primus stove, that he failed to observe my approach, up and along the rocky spine of An Cirein and through the ruins of the township. When I finally reached him, we greeted each other as though meeting by arrangement in Main Street: a remarkably cool encounter!
I gave him the stuff I’d carried out - including that pivotal letter - then took a couple of photographs of him perched on his rock, with the tremendous vista of the Inans Bay, Beinn na Faire and the Atlantic beyond him.
The burners of his stove were evidently clogged, so he temporarily gave up the tea—making and accepted a cup from the remains in my flask. We talked briefly, he showed me the sketches he had so far done, then I left him and descended into the bay, where, at his camp, I boiled a kettle for tea on his splendidly constructed fireplace, complete with grill.
I was joined in mid-afternoon by Jimmy MacDonald, and after a spot of beachcombing and a further brew-up, we returned to Machrihanish by the coast, catching the 6.30 bus with barely a minute to spare.
Johnny himself was blessed with a week of uncommonly fine weather, and returned home on Monday 14th. He was utterly alone on the coast for the greater part of his time there. One day shepherds came and herded sheep, apparently oblivious to his presence, and at the weekend he was joined in the bay by a party of young campers from Campbeltown. When not sketching from his rock, he was exploring round about the glen.
He has completed the first stage - three years - of his training as an architect at Glasgow Art School, and now has two years to spend, gaining experience in an architectural practice, and preparing a folio of drawings and paintings, and a dissertation. Thereafter, he will return to full-time study for two years.
His project - simply stated - is to be a study of the human impact, architecturally perceived, on the coasts of south Kintyre. His special interest is sheep-fanks, which, being strictly functional and lacking in “architectural thought”, paradoxically, perhaps, attract him. In the two sheep-fanks in the Inans Glen - both visible from his rock - he found fitting subjects, and the sketches he did during his week there concentrate on their relation to each other as forms on the landscape. There is more to the project than that, of course. It is yet a growing thing.
As for me, I wonder if I’ll ever again deliver a letter on that coast? I doubt it.
I was indeed fortunate to be on holiday during the first week of October, when summer arrived in Scotland. There was one day of drizzle - the Thursday - but apart from that I remember only calm sunny days. Friday, Saturday and Sunday were perfect - the children were running around in T-shirts and I was in my shirt sleeves, and able to sit outside puffing serenely at my pipe, the real test - for me - of climatic conditions.
We spent two days at our caravan at Polliwilline. On our final day there, which was Saturday, when we woke and drew the curtains of the van and looked out on the beach, we saw a white object lying half-way down the ebb. I took it to be a ball, but when we went down to investigate, we discovered it to be a BALLOON with a string attached to it. The end of the string had got covered by sand, effectively anchoring the balloon, and when I pulled on the string there emerged from the sand a label, the message on which - though protected by a plastic film - was beginning to blur. It read: Kirsty Craven, High Dykes Primary School, Braehead, Bonhill (Dunbartonshire), and asked that the label be returned.
We all found this rather exciting - definitely more so than my wooden boats with paper sails, which refused to clear the shore and were cast back at us again and again - and I Immediately fetched pen and paper and sat on a rock to write to Kirsty.
In December, I received a reply from her - she was only six years old - along with a more detailed covering letter from the school’s head teacher, Miss C. A. Murray. The balloon had been released, in a race, on 9 October, and we found it the following morning. Presumably, it had lost height on the north-easterly wind and dropped into the sea. Other balloons in the race, however, reached Ireland, the furthest-travelled being found at Newcastlewest in County Limerick.
This wasn’t my first such find. At the Inans, on 15 May 1988, I found a label only. It proclaimed a ‘Postcode Balloon Race’. The sender was Pamela Doherty of Erskine. ‘Finder,’ read the label, ‘you may win a prize. Fill in your name and address and post to the address on the reverse. Which was that of the Scottish Postal Board in Edinburgh. I did more than that: I identified myself as a Royal Mail employee, and described the circumstances of the find - a holiday hike on a remote Atlantic coast.
I’d have thought that these particulars would have merited a snippet in the Royal Mail rag, but I didn’t hear a word from anyone, a discourtesy which still rankles.
George McSporran had a week’s holiday the week after mine, in October, but the weather didn’t favour him as it had favoured me. He did, however, manage a few short hikes, one of which was to Craigaig with his son Sandy and two other youngsters.
I met George the day after, and he announced that one of the boys, Darren Cook, had found a CLAY PIPE at Craigaig, and would show it to me. This was indeed interesting to me, as a casual collector of clay pipes and a former user of the things. I asked if Darren had found the pipe on the beach. No, George said, not the beach; and he described to me where it had been found. It was at that point I realised that the pipe had been my own!
About 15 years ago, a nephew, Malcolm Docherty, and I camped a night at Craigaig. I don’t remember much about the trip except that we had no tent, and lay in sleeping-bags out in the open. Our sleep that night was more than usually disturbed, because our chosen ‘bed’ - and there isn’t much of a choice on that stony coast - sloped a little, and we were continually slipping downwards in our bags and having to drag ourselves back to ‘bed’.
I also remember that I broke the clay pipe I was smoking at the time, and stuck it in a rock crevice near the waterfall, with the idea of checking on it from time to time to see how long it would lie undiscovered. George had been firing Darren’s imagination with yarns about pirates and smugglers hiding out on the coast hundreds of years ago. Sorry, lads: the pipe is no older than twenty years, was made in England and bought in Edinburgh.
In October, I got a second-hand report of a sighting of ‘hundreds of BATS’ clinging to the ivy at the back of Lochhead werehouse, the site of which now bears a William Low (now Tesco - Ian) supermarket. They were seen one morning by a young woman, Mary McMillan, who was going to work at the time. This was during the initial stages of demolition, when the roof was coming off, but the walls were still intact.
I reported the sighting to the then newly-appointed Scottish Natural Heritage officer for Kintyre, Dan Hunt. He reckoned that the bats were likely Pipistrelles, but he considered it unlikely that they represented a winter roost, because Pipistrelles normally congregate in smaller groups. If, however, it was a winter roost, then the early date should have meant that the bats, given a few hours to ‘come to’, could have roused themselves and moved elsewhere.
I wonder what became of that colony. Had its existence in the werehouse been known - or even suspected - then the bats could have been rescued. Any building containing roosting bats should be notified to Scottish Natural Heritage. Often these are houses with bats in the roofspace. If the owner/occupier of such a building wishes to do any work likely to disturb the bats or affect their roost, then a licence is needed from SNH.
All species of bats in Britain are protected by the 1981 Wildlife and Countryside Act, and it is illegal to kill, injure or take any bat, or to disturb it or its roost, or to block roost entrances and exits, without a licence. Bats can only be legitimately disturbed - but not injured or killed - if they are in the dwelling area of a house.
Mr Hunt remarks: ‘There is little information an the distribution of bats in Scotland. The reporting of sites by the public is a major input to identifying roosts. We are always pleased to be informed of roosts and any details are dealt with in confidence. The legislation protecting bats applies to any roost regardless of whether we have been notified of its existence. If people in Kintyre require a licence, wish to report any roosts, or need guidance on bats in their property, then they can contact me at the SNH office: 1 Kilmory Estate, Kilmory, Lochgilphead, Argyll PA31 8RR (01546 6O3611).'
There were other refugees from the crumbling werehouse - RATS. One - at least - of that fleeing horde visited my backyard in search of suitable quarters. My family and I watched him from the kitchen window as he scurried here and there among the clutter. My downstairs neighbour, also saw him, and he and I conferred; but neither of us was willing to actually attack the creature. We did, however, clear the yard of various debris - mostly belonging to the Martins - and I blocked gaps in the shed and coal-cellar doors. When Lochend U.F. Church was demolished in the 1980s there was likewise a mass exodus of rats.
I found myself almost wishing back the stray CATS which plagued us for several years after we moved into Saddell Street. I waged constant war against the horde. Nights were worst, and I plannied my campaign with military precision: a basinful of water placed at my bedside, and the window unsnibbed for ease of opening and to reduce noise. When awakened by the yowling of the tom, I’d position myself at the opened window and watch for the appearance of the enemy down in the yard. I managed only one direct hit throughout the campaign, but I felt justice had been done and slept that night with great satisfaction.
One evening, at the height of the Cat Campaign, I was regaling guests at dinner with gleeful fantasies as to what I’d do to any cat I got my hands on: I’d skin it and roast it, etc. During this diatribe, some one noticed the movement of a small creature in the study, and we rose to investigate. Under the bed-settee what did we discover but a tiny stray kitten, which must have stolen in while the front door was lying open. My wife has never let me forget how I fed the wretched thing until, one day shortly after, it failed to reappear. In the most evil of personalities there glimmers the faint light of compassion!
The marked decrease in the stray cat population over the past couple of years is largely attributable to the dedicated efforts of the Kintyre Cat Rescue, a group of local volunteers which brings strays into care, and neuters individuals among them. Cat Rescue can be contacted through Ms Dorothy Grant, Tigh an Oisin, New Quay Street, Campbeltown.
As I was walking home on 13 November of last year, about 9.30 p.m., I noticed something lying motionless on the road opposite the yacht pontoon. Darkness had come by then and I couldn’t see the thing plainly, but it appeared to be a CONGER EEL. I passed it by and began crossing the road towards the Swimming Pool, but my conscience stopped me. If it were an eel, and still alive, to abandon it there would be cruelty, so I turned back and approached it, intending to touch it with the toe of my shoe and try to elicit a response.
I didn’t get that far in the strategy, for the eel - which indeed it was, and about 3 ft. long - saw me coming, and began writhing. Now, I have nothing against either eels or snakes, but I don’t like touching them. I should simply have caught it by the neck - as I was accustomed to doing at the fishing, albeit with gloves - and flung it back into the sea, but I balked at that prospect, and decided to take a walk down the Old Quay and try to find something with which I could move the thing towards the water without having to touch it directly.
I found a stiff plastic pipe - coated in oil, as I later found out! - lying beside a heaped net, and returned to the spot. I must have looked rather suspicious as I went about the business of pushing the creature along the road and on to the pavement, but I managed to manoeuvre it to the harbour wall and roll it into the water. It swam feebly on the surface for a few minutes, then seemed to recover its vigour, and disappeared into the murky water. I presume it survived, and presume, too, that it had wriggled off a fish lorry. Lucky, lucky eel!
While I was studying the water, wondering if I'd seen the last of the eel, what should appear, paddling out of the darkness, but two GEESE! This, I thought to myself, is turning into a decidedly unusual night. Puzzled, I left them, not expecting to see them again.
But see them I did, many times, and so did the greater part of the population of town and country. They became, in fact, a local attraction. They made their base the green area between Swimming Pool and Pontoon, feeding there on the grass - and on proferred bread, etc. - and haunting the quays and harbour.
It was obvious that these geese - greylags - had been tamed, and I am satisfied that they came from a certain smallholding within the burgh. They were certainly not wild.
In daily danger from motor traffic and from the possibility of calculated violence, it was a matter of curiosity and concern to me how long the geese would survive their close contact with urbanised man. As it happened, the end evidently came by natural causes. The female died early in December, and, as her mate refused to leave her body, the SSPCA inspector from Lochgilphead, John McAvoy, removed him and found him a home in Lochgilphead, with other geese and ducks for company.
I have my daughter, Amelia, to thank for a few delightful minutes’ bird-watching on 21 November of last year. My wife was away in Oban on a Girl Guides training weekend, and I had sole charge of my three daughters. My first night hadn’t been a happy one - both Amelia and the baby, Isabella, ended up in my bed, lying on either side of me, and seemingly taking it in turn to torment me with their shared ‘comfort’ habit of scratching and nipping my neck. I was in no mood for the joys of nature that Saturday morning as I led my little brood through wind and rain, one in the pram, one on the pram, and Sarah gamely trotting alongside.
As we passed by the walled triangle between the Ardsheil Hotel and Pensioners Row, Amelia suddenly said to me: “Dada, there’s a wee robin up that tree.” I stopped and looked, and, sure enough, there was a bird on the near tree within the triangle itself, but it wasn’t a robin. I could see clearly that it was a TREE-CREEPER. I immediately parked the pram, lifted Amelia from her perch and set off with her and Sarah to view the bird at closer quarters. It soon flew off to a further tree, but just as soon returned with - as Sarah pointed out - a companion tree-creeper. We watched them for a few minutes, then let them be. They seemed quite oblivious to the passing traffic.
The tree-creeper is quite a distinctive bird, being about the size of a house-sparrow and similarly coloured about the back, but with a markedly white breast and a thin, curved beak, which is used for probing into the cracks and crevices of bark for insects. Its movements are short and jerky like those of woodpeckers, and it invariably searches upwards on a tree trunk, and, having reached the top, flies to the bottom of the next tree and works up that one. A rare and pleasant sighting, thanks to the keen eyes of a child.
MAGPIES have begun to reappear in Kintyre in recent years, but so far none has been reported south of Glenbarr, and there has been no indication of nesting activity. The appearances are evidently brief.
Mr D. B. Batty, Scottish Natural Heritage officer for South Argyll and Bute, saw one near Whitehouse in 1990. In spring of last year one was seen in the Clachan area for about a fortnight, Mr Ian MacDonald reports; and he saw one at Muasdale also. My Royal Mail colleague, Mr Brian Cook, spotted one on 1 November at Glenbarr, while emptying the mail-box there during his Sunday collection run to Tarbert. The bird was perched on the roan of Glenbarr Stores.
I consulted Wild Birds of South Kintyre, a paper compiled by Latimer McInnes and Duncan Colville and privately circulated in 1944. Magpies are therein described as ‘once not locally uncomon’. In the mid-nineteenth century they nested ‘in the hedges flanking the Pump Walk in Dalintober’, and were ‘very numerous’, and resident, in Conieglen in the 1880s. One was killed, in 1893, by striking telegraph wires near Drum Farm.
The birds were being seen occasionally in the 1920s and 30s - one at Saddell in 1921, one at Southend c. 1929, and one shot between Campbeltown and Southend in 1934. Mr MacDonald in Clachan tells me that his last sighting in Kintyre, prior to last year, was in 1947.
The McInnes-Colville paper makes fascinating reading as a gauge of the fluctuating fortunes of species in Kintyre. I’m not going to plunder the paper indiscriminately in order to catalogue the extraordinary, but prefer to keep it as a kind of treasure from which I may extract appropriate gems.
Two SNOW BUNTINGS were sighted at Ormsary, Glen Breackerie, on Christmas Day of last year by Chris and Trish Lambert.
My 41st birthday, on 6 February, was celebrated, as has become customary, at Dunaverty Boathouse, Southend, the charming winter residence of my friend, Donnie McLean. While prowling on the shore, as dinner cooked, one of the guests, Mrs Jane Gallagher, discovered a dead OTTER directly below the house. It was a young dog otter and not greatly decayed, but what was most noticeable about it was a circular wound on its hind quarters, which, on later examination, proved to have been inflicted by a wire snare. The snare was still embedded in the body, and must have been dragged around by the creature until death released him from suffering. The find was reported to the SSPCA, but, such snares being still legal for the catching of rabbits and foxes, no action could be taken.
Between the Inans and the Galdrans, on 7 October 1992, Jimmy MacDonald and I counted 77 WILD GOATS.
The Doirlinn - the tidal shingle bar linking Davaar Island to the mainland - is the only beach in South Kintyre where OYSTER shells are to be found in any quantity. These shells are obviously many years old: discoloured and crumbling. I have never come across a single fresh shell, and have often wondered if that bed of oysters is now extinct. I was therefore most interested to meet a woman who had evidently -some fifty years ago - tasted a Doirlinn oyster.
One Saturday, in December of last year, Sid Gallagher and I enjoyed a hike to Greenland. We both fancied a pint of beer before dinner, and crossed the road from my house to the Gluepot. There, we sat with the sisters Anna and Patsy Anderson.
When they heard that we’d been hiking, Anna began reminiscing on her walks with her father, Stevie Anderson, a veteran of both World Wars. One day he took her to the Doirlinn to gather cockles, and she was so eager to go that she neglected to eat a breakfast. Later in the day she became so hungry that her father, to ease her craving a little, produced two shellfish, opened them, gave her one to eat raw, and ate the other himself.
She never forgot the taste of it and didn’t discover what it was she had relished so much until, a couple of years ago, on holiday in Blackpool, she decided to sample oysters. With her first bite she was back again with her father on the Doirlinn, and the mystery was unlocked.
While writing up last issue’s account of PEAT-CUTTING, I forgot to mention a word that was given to me by my good friend Archie McNicol in Glenramskill. I am collecting local dialect words for the Scottish National Dictionary Project in Edinburgh, a collection which I hope to publish once it is completed, and once the SND staff has processed my submissions.
Archie - with many another local - knows I am collecting words, and one day last year when I was up at the farm with his mail, he mentioned he had ‘an old word’ for me. This is always an interesting gambit - will it be a ‘first-timer’, or a familiar one yet again? It was indeed a new word, and a very interesting one at that: claddach. He gave its meaning as being the bottom of a peat bank after the peats had been cut out.
It is obviously Gaelic cladach - ‘shore, beach, coast, stony beach’, etc. - which has gone across to Scots as claddach - ‘the gravelly bed or edge of a river’ - and I can only think that the peat-cutting application (unrecorded in any dictionary, to my knowledge) is connected with the fact that at the very bottom of a peat deposit there is generally found a bed of clay and stones.
Archie’s own father, Duncan McNicol, with whom he cut peats in his younger years, was a Gaelic speaker, but Archie assures me that the word was in general use among the hill folk of south Kintyre.
Page 2: Half a Highlander / North Carolina 1739-1989 (short) / Ring Net Fishing (short)
Page 3: The Lowland Church Baptismal Basin / The Lowland Church Baptismal Laver
Page 4: Seventeenth Century Agricultural Tenancys in Kintyre
Page 5: A Miniature Volcano
Page 6: The Private Journal of Robert Picken, Smerby, 1810-1840
Page 7: After Culloden / A Melder Wi' the Miller
Page 9: Three Interesting e-mails and some Bits and Bobs
Page 10: Researching your Family History